Transaction Manager Supports Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance

by Aylin Korkmaz, Manager, Accenture UK

February 15, 2005

Managing financial transactions with the right balance of functionality, flexibility, security, and efficiency is the ultimate goal of today's competitive economy. An infrastructure that facilitates straight-through processing (STP) can best support these goals and provide the transparency that Sarbanes-Oxley compliance demands. SAP provides that infrastructure with Transaction Manager, a component of Treasury and Risk Management.

Key Concept

Straight-through processing (STP) integrates all aspects of financial transactions. It makes these processes efficient because data progresses automatically from one step to another without being manually re-entered at each step. SAP Transaction Manager facilitates STP by eliminating parallel structures to create transparency and streamline the financial process.

Increasing numbers of companies are investing and hedging their free cash. Transaction Manager, a component of SAP R/3's Treasury and Risk Management module that is also available in mySAP ERP, is designed to manage those investment processes. With Transaction Manager, companies do not have to use spreadsheet or treasury software to record the investments and do not have to resort to manual processes or interfaces to post to FI. Such manual tracking can create regulatory compliance problems, including Sarbanes-Oxley. New functions in SAP Transaction Manager support Sarbanes-Oxley and German regulations and improve compliance with the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and Financial Accounting Standards (FAS).

Transaction Manager has been available as part of SAP R/3 since Release 4.0B. New developments in R/3 Enterprise have been available since 2002. See the sidebar, "Transaction Manager Release Strategy." I'll describe the functionality of Transaction Manager SAP Enterprise 4.7 Extension Set 1.10 and show how it helps meet regulatory requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Then I'll show how you can use it for making a fixed-term deposit.

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Aylin Korkmaz

Aylin Korkmaz is a manager in Accenture’s Global Energy practice specializing in finance streamlining and management reporting. She has seven years of experience working in global multi-stream projects containing challenging business process designs and change management issues. Aylin has deep process architecture and design skills, and is one of Accenture’s leading practitioners in the area of Financial and Strategic Enterprise Management modules. She has led design and configuration teams within complex SAP solution environments and delivered cutting-edge finance and business intelligence solutions.